Huysmans on Grünewald

1

Grünewald
(see the WebMuseum),
a contemporary of Dürer, was a
painter in the school of mannerism of the German
Renaissance locally known as
the "Danube-School," which succeeded the Late
Gothic style in the area around Frankfurt. As well as
a court painter, he evidently served as a court architect
and as a hydraulic engineer, also doing technical
drawing. He may have participated in the Peasants'
Revolt in 1525, and he may have lost his job as a
painter because of it.
A biography is online from Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia.

After writing the decadent novel A
Rebours, J.-K. Huysmans moved farther away
from the Naturalism of Zola in the first chapter of
his novel Là-Bas, a study of
modern Satanism and a movement toward Catholicism.
In part of this chapter, which
follows, Huysmans presented
Grünewald's work as a sort of mystic naturalism.
Later, Huysmans followed up with a longer essay on
Grünewald, which
concludes this page. Huysmans in
his life as a writer (when he was not working as a
spymaster) reviewed much painting, including that of the
Symbolists such as Moreau and Redon, and the Impressionists.

Huysmans' first essay
refers to the so-called Tauberbischofsheim
Altarpiece, now in the Kunsthalle at Karlsruhe, Germany.
In 1888, Huysmans saw it in the Cassel museum, whose
director had identified it as being by Grünewald
instead of by Dürer, as thought formerly. The
painting, on a pinewood panel (195.5 x 152.5 cm), has
been dated on stylistic grounds to 1525. Another
panel beneath, "The Carrying of the Cross,"
was discovered in 1883. We have not
been able to locate a color reproduction of this
Crucifixion. A 70KB monochrome JPEG
file may be viewed as you continue
reading (in another window
if you have a frames-capable browser, but
in this window if not)
by selecting this link.

The
second essay
refers to the Isenheim Altarpiece,
which was painted for the Antonite monastery in Isenheim
(Alsace) and is now in the Unterlinden Museum, Colmar,
France. A date of 1515 appears in the painting, which
consists of some nine panels of limewood that fold into
an altar with overall dimensions of about 8 by 5 meters.
Each of the large panels is about 270 x 150 cm. Three
figures are carved in the rear of the altar, probably
by Hagnower, while the predella Entombment
at the bottom is by Beychel. The altar was disassembled
in 1794.

The Isenheim monastery was quite rich and contained a
hospital for patients with skin and blood diseases and
epilepsy.
According to Eberhard
Ruhmer ("Grünewald: The Paintings," Phaidon,
1958), "The high altar of the church was the first
stage of the healing programme: the patient was taken
to it to begin with, to assure him the possibility of
participating in a miracle." Many of the elements
of the Crucifixion and Christmas scenes have been
explained as allegorical symbols inspired among others
by the Revelations of St. Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373,
but first published in 1492), forecasting a reformation
of the church.

Ruhmer reveals "the altarpiece contains an unusual
number of pentimenti which give interesting insight
into Grünewald's method of working. Thus the Head
of Christ was not originally brought down so low, whilst
the right upper arm--which was altered at least three
times--was drawn up. The Virgin originally stood up
straight, the drapery fell diagonally to the back, her
eyes were open and fixed on Christ. St. John was not
holding her, his right arm and hand have been altered
several times. The same applies to the head of Mary
Magdalen. St. John the Baptist's outstretched index
finger was not originally bent up so much."

Reproductions of elements of the Isenheim altarpiece
may be found in several locations on the World Wide
Web. You may wish to display one or more of them in
a separate window as you read the second essay.
(If the new window appears directly on top of the old
one, just move it to the side. Another tip: the
BACK command on your browser won't take you back to
the other window.).

The first stage of the Isenheim altarpiece,
shown here
in a monochrome 133KB JPEG
file, has the Crucifixion in the center,
with St. Anthony to the left and St. Sebastian to the
right, as you face it. The Entombment
is at the bottom.

The second stage, again in a monochrome JPEG file
(146KB) has the Crucifixion panels opened to the side,
revealing the Annunciation to the left and the
Resurrection to the right, with the Christmas picture
in the center.

The third stage, here in a monochrome JPEG file
(157KB) shows the rear of the altarpiece, with The
Two Hermits at the left and The Temptation of
St. Anthony to the right, a carved centerpiece
attributed to Niklas Hagnower, and a carved predella by
Desiderius Beychel.

The WebMuseum is mirrored in several sites around the
world--you should choose the one nearest your computer.
Here we use the University of North Carolina Sun site
for convenience to Americans.
We also show some reproductions from Carol Gerten-Jackson's
beautiful site in Greece.

We do not reference any other of Grünewald's works here,
since Huysmans does not write of them. In particular, you
should not confuse the Crucifixion
now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington with these.

2

(now at Karlsruhe)
from Là-Bas
Chapter 1
by J.-K. Huysmans

Translated by Keene Wallace

. . . .

Now his thoughts carried him away from his
dissatisfaction with literature to the
satisfaction he had found in another art, in
painting. His ideal was completely realized by
the Primitives. These men, in Italy, Germany, and
especially in Flanders, had manifested the
amplitude and purity of vision which are the
property of saintliness. In authentic and
patiently accurate settings they pictured beings
whose postures were caught from life itself, and
the illusion was compelling and sure. From these
heads, common enough, many of them, and these
physiognomies, often ugly but powerfully
evocative, emanated celestial joy or acute
anguish, spiritual calm or turmoil. The effect
was of matter transformed, by being distended or
compressed, to afford an escape from the senses
into remote infinity.

Durtal's introduction to this naturalism had come
as a revelation the year before, although he had
not then been so weary as now of fin de
siècle
silliness. In Germany, before a Crucifixion by
Matthæus Grünewald, he had found what he was
seeking.

He shuddered in his armchair and closed his eyes
as if in pain. With extraordinary lucidity he
revisualized the picture, and the cry of
admiration wrung from him when he had entered the
little room of the Cassel museum was reechoing in
his mind as here, in his study, the Christ rose
before him, formidable, on a rude cross of barky
wood, the arm an untrimmed branch bending like a
bow under the weight of the body.

This branch seemed about to spring back and
mercifully hurl afar from our cruel, sinful world
the suffering flesh held to earth by the enormous
spike piercing the feet. Dislocated, almost
ripped out of their sockets, the arms of the
Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of
the straining muscles. The laboured tendons of
the armpits seemed ready to snap. The fingers,
wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture
in which were supplication and reproach but also
benediction. The trembling thighs were greasy
with sweat. The ribs were like staves, or like
the bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue,
mottled with flea-bites, specked as with
pin-pricks by spines broken off from the rods of
the scourging and now festering beneath the skin
where they had penetrated.

Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the
side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with
blood that was like congealing mulberry juice.
Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish,
something like the colour of grey Moselle, oozed
from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and
the loin cloth. The knees had been forced
together and the rotulae touched, but the lower
legs were held wide apart, though the feet were
placed one on top of the other. These, beginning
to putrefy, were turning green beneath a river of
blood. Spongy and blistered, they were horrible,
the flesh tumefied, swollen over the head of the
spike, and the gripping toes, with the horny blue
nails, contradicted the imploring gesture of the
hands, turning that benediction into a curse; and
as the hands pointed heavenward, so the feet
seemed to cling to earth, to that ochre ground,
ferruginous like the purple soil of Thuringia.

Above this eruptive cadaver, the head, tumultuous,
enormous, encircled by a disordered crown of
thorns, hung down lifeless. One lacklustre eye
half opened as a shudder of terror or of sorrow
traversed the expiring figure. The face was
furrowed, the brow seamed, the cheeks blanched;
all the drooping features wept, while the mouth,
unnerved, its under jaw racked by tetanic
contractions, laughed atrociously.

The torture had been terrific, and the agony had
frightened the mocking executioners into flight.

Against a dark blue night-sky the cross seemed to
bow down, almost to touch the ground with its tip,
while two figures, one on each side, kept watch
over the Christ. One was the Virgin, wearing a
hood the colour of mucous blood over a robe of wan
blue. Her face was pale and swollen with weeping,
and she stood rigid, as one who buries his
fingernails deep into his palms and sobs. The
other figure was that of Saint John, like a gipsy
or sunburnt Swabian peasant, very tall, his beard
matted and tangled, his robe of a scarlet stuff
cut in wide strips like slabs of bark. His mantle
was a chamois yellow; the lining, caught up at the
sleeves, showed a feverish yellow as of unripe
lemons. Spent with weeping, but possessed of more
endurance than Mary, who was yet erect but broken
and exhausted, he had joined his hands and in an
access of outraged loyalty had drawn himself up
before the corpse, which he contemplated with his
red and smoky eyes while he choked back the cry
which threatened to rend his quivering throat.

Ah, this coarse, tear-compelling Calvary was at
the opposite pole from those debonair Golgothas
adopted by the Church ever since the Renaissance.
This lockjaw Christ was not the Christ of the
rich, the Adonis of Galilee, the exquisite dandy,
the handsome youth with the curly brown tresses,
divided beard, and insipid doll-like features,
whom the faithful have adored for four centuries.
This was the Christ of Justin, Basil, Cyril,
Tertullian, the Christ of the apostolic church,
the vulgar Christ, ugly with the assumption of the
whole burden of our sins and clothed, through
humility, in the most abject of forms.

It was the Christ of the poor, the Christ
incarnate in the image of the most miserable of us
He came to save; the Christ of the afflicted, of
the beggar, of all those on whose indigence and
helplessness the greed of their brother battens;
the human Christ, frail of flesh, abandoned by the
Father until such time as no further torture was
possible; the Christ with no recourse but His
Mother, to Whom--then powerless to aid Him--He
had, like every man in torment, cried out with an
infant's cry.

In an unsparing humility, doubtless, He had willed
to suffer the Passion with all the suffering
permitted to the human senses, and, obeying an
incomprehensible ordination, He, in the time of
the scourging and of the blows and of the insults
spat in His face, had put off divinity, nor had He
resumed it when, after these preliminary
mockeries, He entered upon the unspeakable torment
of the unceasing agony. Thus, dying like a thief,
like a dog, basely, vilely, physically, He had
sunk himself to the deepest depth of fallen
humanity and had not spared Himself the last
ignominy of putrefaction.

Never before had naturalism transfigured itself by
such a conception and execution. Never before had
a painter so charnally envisaged divinity nor so
brutally dipped his brush into the wounds and
running sores and bleeding nail holes of the
Saviour. Grünewald had passed all measure. He
was the most uncompromising of realists, but his
morgue Redeemer, his sewer Deity, let the observer
know that realism could be truly transcendent. A
divine light played about that ulcerated head, a
superhuman expression illuminated the fermenting
skin of the epileptic features. This crucified
corpse was a very God, and, without aureole,
without nimbus, with none of the stock
accoutrements except the blood-sprinkled crown of
thorns, Jesus appeared in His celestial
super-essence, between the stunned, grief-torn
Virgin and a Saint John whose calcined eyes were
beyond the shedding of tears.

These faces, by nature vulgar, were resplendent,
transfigured with the expression of the sublime
grief of those souls whose plaint is not heard.
Thief, pauper, and peasant had vanished and given
place to supraterrestial creatures in the presence
of their God.

Grünewald was the most uncompromising of
idealists. Never had artist known such
magnificent exaltation, none had ever so
resolutely bounded from the summit of spiritual
altitude to the rapt orb of heaven. He had gone
to the two extremes. From the rankest weeds of
the pit he had extracted the finest essence of
charity, the mordant liquor of tears. In this
canvas was revealed the masterpiece of an art
obeying the unopposable urge to render the
tangible and the invisible, to make manifest the
crying impurity of the flesh and to make sublime
the infinite distress of the soul.

It was without its equivalent in literature. A
few pages of Anne Emmerich upon the Passion,
though comparatively attenuated, approached this
ideal of supernatural realism and of veridic and
exsurrected life. Perhaps, too, certain effusions
of Ruysbroeck, seeming to spurt forth in twin jets
of black and white flame, were worthy of
comparison with the divine befoulment of
Grünewald. Hardly, either. Grünewald's
masterpiece remained unique. It was at the same
time infinite and of earth earthy.

. . . .

3

from Trois Primitifs
by J.-K. Huysmans

Translated by Robert Baldick
Phaidon Press Ltd., 1958

MATTHIAS GRÜNEWALD, the painter of the Cassel
Crucifixion
which I described in Là-bas and which
is now in the Karlsruhe Museum, has fascinated me
for many years. Whence did he come, what was his
life, where and how did he die? Nobody knows for
certain; his very name has been disputed, and the
relevant documents are lacking; the pictures now
accepted as his work were formerly attributed in
turn to Albrecht Dürer, Martin Schongauer and Hans
Baldung Grien, while others which he never painted
are conceded to him by countless handbooks and
museum catalogues...

It is not to Mainz, Aschaffenburg, Eisenach, or
even to Isenheim, whose monastery is dead, that we
must go to find Grünewald's works, but to Colmar,
where the master displays his genius in a
magnificent ensemble, a polyptych composed of nine
pieces.

There, in the old Unterlinden convent, he seizes
on you the moment you go in and promptly strikes
you dumb with the fearsome nightmare of a Calvary.
It is as if a typhoon of art had been let loose
and was sweeping you away, and you need a few
minutes to recover from the impact, to surmount
the impression of awful horror made by the huge
crucified Christ dominating the nave of this
museum, which is installed in the old disaffected
chapel of the convent.

The scene is arranged as follows:

In the centre of the picture a gigantic Christ, of
disproportionate size if compared with the figures
grouped around him, is nailed to a cross which has
been roughly trimmed so that patches of bare wood
are exposed here and there; the transverse branch,
dragged down by the hands, is bent as in the
Karlsruhe Crucifixion into the shape of a bow.
The body looks much the same in the two works:
pale and shiny, dotted with spots of blood, and
bristling like a chestnut-burr with splinters that
the rods have left in the wounds; at the ends of
the unnaturally long arms the hands twist
convulsively and claw the air; the knees are
turned in so that the bulbous knee-caps almost
touch; while the feet, nailed one on top of the
other, are just a jumbled heap of muscles
underneath rotting, discoloured flesh and blue
toe-nails; as for the head, it lolls on the
bulging, sack-like chest patterned with stripes by
the cage of the ribs. This crucified Christ would
be a faithful replica of the one at Karlsruhe if
the facial expression were not entirely different.
Here, in fact, Jesus no longer wears the fearful
rictus of tetanus; the jaw is no longer
contracted, but hangs loosely, with open mouth and
slavering lips.

Christ is less frightening here, but more humanly
vulgar, more obviously dead. In the Karlsruhe
panel the terrifying effect of the trismus, of the
strident laugh, served to conceal the brutishness
of the features, now accentuated by this imbecile
slackness of the mouth. The Man-God of Colmar is
nothing but a common thief who has met his end on
the gallows.

That is not the only difference to be noted
between the two works, for here the grouping of
the figures is also dissimilar. At Karlsruhe the
Virgin stands, as usual, on one side of the cross
and St. John on the other; at Colmar the
traditional arrangement is flouted, and the
astonishing visionary that was Grünewald asserts
himself, at once ingenious and ingenuous, a
barbarian and a theologian, unique among religious
painters.

On the right of the cross there are three figures:
the Virgin, St. John and Magdalen. St. John,
looking rather like an old German student with his
peaky, clean-shaven face and his fair hair falling
in long, dry wisps over a red robe, is holding in
his arms a quite extraordinary Virgin, clad and
coifed in white, who has fallen into a swoon, her
face white as a sheet, her eyes shut, her lips
parted to reveal her teeth. Her features are fine
and delicate, and entirely modern; if it were not
for the dark green dress which can be glimpsed
close to the tighdy clenched hands, you might take
her for a dead nun; she is pitiable and charming,
young and beautiful. Kneeling in front of her is
a little woman who is leaning back with her hands
clasped together and raised towards Christ. This
oldish, fair-haired creature, wearing a pink dress
with a myrtle-green lining, her face cut in half
below the eyes by a veil on a level with the nose,
is Magdalen. She is ugly and ungainly, but so
obviously inconsolable that she grips your heart
and moves it to compassion.

On the other side of the picture, to the left of
the cross, there stands a tall, strange figure
with a shock of sandy hair cut straight across the
forehead, limpid eyes, a shaggy beard, and bare
arms, legs and feet, holding an open book in one
hand and pointing to Christ with the other.

This tough old soldier from Franconia, with his
camel-hair fleece showing under a loosely draped
cloak and a belt tied in a big knot, is St. John
the Baptist. He has risen from the dead, and in
order to explain the emphatic, dogmatic gesture of
the long, curling forefinger pointed at the
Redeemer, the following inscription has been set
beside his arm: Illum oportet crescere, me autem
minui. 'He must increase, but I must decrease.'

He who decreased to make way for the Messiah, who
in turn died to ensure the predominance of the
Word in the world, is alive here, while He who was
alive when he was defunct, is dead. It seems as
if, in coming to life again, he is foreshadowing
the triumph of the Resurrection, and that after
proclaiming the Nativity before Jesus was born on
earth, he is now proclaiming that Christ is born
in Heaven, and heralding Easter. He has come back
to bear witness to the accomplishment of the
prophecies, to reveal the truth of the Scriptures;
he has come back to ratify, as it were, the
exactness of those words of his which will later
be recorded in the Gospel of that other St. John
whose place he has taken on the left of
Calvary--St. John the Apostle, who does not
listen to him now, who does not even see him, so
engrossed is he with the Mother of Christ, as if
numbed and paralysed by the manchineel of sorrow
that is the cross.

So, alone in the midst of the sobbing and the
awful spasms of the sacrifice, this witness of the
past and the future, standing stolidly upright,
neither weeps nor laments: he certifies and
promulgates, impassive and resolute. And at his
feet is the Lamb of the World that he baptized,
carrying a cross, with a stream of blood pouring
into a chalice from its wounded breast.

Thus arranged, the figures stand out against a
background of gathering darkness. Behind the
gibbet, which is planted on a river bank, there
flows a stream of sadness, swift-moving yet the
colour of stagnant water; and the somewhat
theatrical presentation of the drama seems
justified, so completely does it harmonize with
this dismal setting, this gloom which is more than
twilight but not yet night. Repelled by the
sombre hues of the background, the eye inevitably
turns from the glossy fleshtints of the Redeemer,
whose enormous proportions no longer hold the
attention, and fastens instead upon the dazzling
whiteness of the Virgin's cloak, which, seconded
by the vermilion of the apostle's clothes,
attracts notice at the expense of the other parts,
and almost makes Mary the principal figure in the
work.

That would spoil the whole picture, but the
balance, about to be upset in favour of the group
on the right, is maintained by the unexpected
gesture of the Precursor, who in his turn seizes
your attention, only to direct it towards the Son.

One might almost say that, coming to this Calvary,
one goes from right to left before arriving at the
centre.

This is undoubtedly what the artist intended, as
is the effect produced by the disproportion
between the various figures, for Grünewald is a
master of pictorial equilibrium and in his other
works keeps everything in proportion. When he
exaggerated the stature of his Christ he was
trying to create a striking impression of profound
suffering and great strength; similarly he made
this figure more than usually remarkable in order
to keep it in the foreground and prevent it from
being completely eclipsed by the great patch of
white that is the Virgin.

As for her, it is easy to see why he gave her such
prominence, easy to understand his predilection
for her--because never before had he succeeded
in painting a Madonna of such divine loveliness,
such super-human sorrow. Indeed, it is
astonishing that she should appear at all in the
rebarbative work of this artist, so completely
does she differ from the type of individual he has
chosen to represent God and his saints.

His Jesus is a thief, his St. John a social
outcast, his Precursor a common soldier. Even
assuming that they are nothing more than German
peasants, she is obviously of very different
extraction; she is a queen who has taken the veil,
a marvellous orchid growing among weeds.

Anyone who has seen both pictures--the one at
Karlsruhe and the one at Colmar--will agree that
there is a clear distinction between them. The
Karlsruhe Calvary is better balanced and there is
no danger of one's attention wandering from the
principal subject. It is also less trivial, more
awe-inspiring. You have only to compare the
hideous rictus of its Christ and the possibly more
plebeian but certainly less degraded face of its
St. John with the coma of the Colmar Christ and
the world-weary grimace of the disciple for the
Karlsruhe panel to appear less conjectural, more
penetrating, more effective, and, in its apparent
simplicity, more powerful; on the other hand, it
lacks the exquisite white Virgin and it is more
conventional, less novel and unexpected. The
Colmar Crucifixion introduces a new element into a
scene treated in the same stereotyped fashion by
every other painter; it dispenses with the old
moulds and discards the traditional patterns. On
reflexion, it seems to be the more imposing and
profound of the two works, but it must be admitted
that introducing the Precursor into the tragedy of
Golgotha is more the idea of a theologian and a
mystic than of an artist; here it is quite likely
that there was some sort of collaboration between
the painter and the purchaser, a commission
described in the minutest detail by Guido Guersi,
the Abbot of Isenheim, in whose chapel this
picture was placed.

That, incidentally, was still the normal procedure
long after the Middle Ages. All the archives of
the period show that when contracting with
image-carvers and painters--who regarded
themselves as nothing more than craftsmen--the
bishops or monks used to draw a plan of the
proposed work, often even indicating the number of
figures to be included and explaining their
significance; there was accordingly only limited
scope for the artist's own initiative, as he had
to work to order within strictly defined bounds.

But to return to the picture, it takes up the
whole of two wood panels which, in closing, cut
one of Christ's arms in two, and, when closed,
bring the two groups together. The back of the
picture (for it has two faces on either side) has
a separate scene on each panel: a Resurrection on
one and an Annunciation on the other. Let me say
straight away that the latter is bad, so that we
can have done with it.

The scene is an oratory, where a book painted with
deceptive realism lies open to reveal the prophecy
of Isaiah, whose distorted figure, topped with a
turban, is floating about in a corner of the
picture, near the ceiling; on her knees in front
of the book we see a fair-haired, puffy-faced
woman, with a complexion reddened by the
cooking-stove, pouting somewhat peevishly at a
great lout with a no less ruddy complexion who is
pointing two extremely long fingers at her in a
truly comical attitude of reproach. It must be
admitted that the Precursor's solemn gesture in
the Crucifixion is utterly ridiculous in this
unhappy imitation, where the two fingers are
extended in what looks like insolent derision. As
for the curly-wigged fellow himself, with that
coarse, fat, red face you would take him for a
grocer rather than an angel, if it were not for
the sceptre he is holding in one hand and the
green-and-red wings stuck to his back. And one
can but wonder how the artist who created the
little white Virgin could possibly represent Our
Lord's Mother in the guise of this disagreeable
slut with a smirk on her swollen lips, all rigged
up in her Sunday best, a rich green dress set off
by a bright vermilion lining.

But if this wing leaves you with a rather painful
impression, the other one sends you into raptures,
for it is a truly magnificent work--unique, I
would say, among the world's paintings. In it
Grünewald shows himself to be the boldest painter
who has ever lived, the first artist who has tried
to convey, through the wretched colours of this
earth, a vision of the Godhead in abeyance on the
cross and then renewed, visible to the naked eye,
on rising from the tomb. With him we are,
mystically speaking, in at the death,
contemplating an art with its back to the wall and
forced further into the beyond, this time, than
any theologian could have instructed the artist to
go. The scene is as follows:

As the sepulchre opens, some drunks in helmet and
armour are knocked head over heels to lie
sprawling in the foreground, sword in hand; one of
them turns a somersault further off, behind the
tomb, and lands on his head, while Christ surges
upwards, stretching out his arms and displaying
the bloody commas on his hands.

This is a strong and handsome Christ, fair-haired
and brown-eyed, with nothing in common with the
Goliath whom we watched decomposing a moment ago,
fastened by nails to the still green wood of a
gibbet. All round this soaring body are rays
emanating from it which have begun to blur its
outline; already the contours of the face are
fluctuating, the features hazing over, the hair
dissolving into a halo of melting gold. The light
spreads out in immense curves ranging from bright
yellow to purple, and finally shading off little
by little into a pale blue which in turn merges
with the dark blue of the night.

We witness here the revival of a Godhead ablaze
with life: the formation of a glorified body
gradually escaping from the carnal shell, which is
disappearing in an apotheosis of flames of which
it is itself the source and seat.

Christ, completely transfigured, rises aloft in
smiling majesty; and one is tempted to regard the
enormous halo which encircles him, shining
brilliantly in the starry night like that star of
the Magi in whose smaller orb Grünewald's
contemporaries used to place the infant Jesus when
painting the Bethlehem story--one is tempted to
regard this halo as the morning star returning,
like the Precursor in the Crucifixion, at night:
as the Christmas star grown larger since its birth
in the sky, like the Messiah's body since his
Nativity on earth.

Having dared to attempt this tour de force,
Grünewald has carried it out with wonderful skill.
In clothing the Saviour he has tried to render the
changing colours of the fabrics as they are
volatilized with Christ. Thus the scarlet robe
turns a bright yellow, the closer it gets to the
light--source of the head and neck, while the
material grows lighter, becoming almost diaphanous
in this river of gold. As for the white shroud
which Jesus is carrying off with him, it reminds
one of those Japanese fabrics which by subtle
gradations change from one colour to another, for
as it rises it takes on a lilac tint first of all,
then becomes pure violet, and finally, like the
last blue circle of the nimbus, merges into the
indigo-black of the night.

The triumphant nature of this ascension is
admirably conveyed. For once the apparently
meaningless phrase 'the contemplative life of
painting' takes on a meaning, for with Grünewald
we enter into the domain of the most exalted
mysticism and glimpse, through the simulacra of
colour and line, the well-nigh tangible emergence
of the Godhead from its physical shell.

It is here, rather than in his horrific Calvaries,
that the undeniable originality of this prodigious
artist is to be seen.

This Crucifixion and this
Resurrection are
obviously the Colmar Museum's brightest jewels,
but the amazing colourist that was Grünewald did
not exhaust the resources of his art with these
two pictures; we shall find more of his work, this
time stranger yet less exalted, in another
double-faced diptych which also stands in the
middle of the old nave.

It depicts, on one side the Nativity and a concert
of angels, on the other a visit from the Patriarch
of the Cenobites to St. Paul the Hermit, and the
temptation of St. Anthony.

In point of fact, this Nativity,
which is rather
an exaltation of the divine Motherhood, is one
with the concert of angels, as is shown by the
utensils, which overlap from one wing to the other
and are cut in two when the panels are brought
together.

The subject of this dual painting is admittedly
obscure. In the left-hand wing the Virgin is seen
against a distant, bluish landscape dominated by a
monastery on a hill--doubtless Isenheim Abbey;
on her left, beside a crib, a tub and a pot, a
fig-tree is growing, and a rose-tree on her right.
Fair-haired, with a florid complexion, thick lips,
a high, bare brow and a straight nose, she is
wearing a blue cloak over a carmine-coloured
dress. She is not the servant-girl type, and has
not come straight from the sheep-pen like her
sister in the Annunciation, but for all that she
is still just an honest German woman bred on beer
and sausages: a farmer's wife, if you like, with
servant-girls under her who look like the Mary of
that other picture, but nothing more. As for the
Child, who is very lifelike and very skilfully
portrayed, he is a sturdy little Swabian peasant,
with a snub nose, sharp eyes, and a pink, smiling
face. And finally, in the sky above Jesus and
Mary and below God the Father, who is smothered in
clouds of orange and gold, swarms of angels are
whirling about like scattered petals caught in a
shower of saffron sunbeams.

All these figures are completely earthbound, and
the artist seems to have realized this, for there
is a radiance emanating from the Child's head and
lighting up the Mother's fingers and face.
Grünewald obviously wanted to convey the idea of
divinity by means of these gleams of light
filtering through the flesh, but this time he was
not bold enough to achieve the desired effect: the
luminous glow fails to conceal either the
vulgarity of the face or the coarseness of the
features.

So far, in any event, the subject is clear enough,
but the same cannot be said of the complementary
scene on the right-hand wing.

Here, in an ultra-Gothic chapel, with
gold-scumbled pinnacles bristling with sinuous
statues of prophets nestling among chicory, hop,
knapweed and holly leaves, on top of slender
pillars entwined by plants with singularly jagged
leaves and twisted stems, are angels of every
description, some in human form and others
appearing simply as heads fitted into haloes
shaped like funeral wreaths or collarettes: angels
with pink or blue faces, angels with multicoloured
or monochrome wings, angels playing the angelot or
the theorbo or the viola d'amore, and all of them,
like the pasty-faced, unhealthy-looking one in the
foreground, gazing in adoration at the great
Virgin in the other wing.

The effect is decidedly odd, but even odder is the
appearance, beside these pure spirits and between
two of the slender columns in the chapel, of
another, smaller Virgin, this time crowned with a
diadem of red-hot iron, who, her face suffused
with a golden halo, her eyes cast down and her
hands joined in prayer, is kneeling before the
other Virgin and the Child.

What is the significance of this strange creature,
who evokes the same weird impression as the girl
with the cock and the money-pouch in Rembrandt's
Night Watch--a girl likewise nimbed with a
gentle radiance? Is this phantom queen a
diminutive St. Anne or some other saint? She
looks just like a Madonna, and a Madonna is what
she must be. In painting her Grünewald has
clearly tried to reproduce the light effect which
blurs the features of Christ in his
Resurrection,
but it is difficult to see why he should do so
here. It may be, of course, that he wanted to
represent the Virgin, crowned after her
Assumption, returning to earth with her angelic
retinue to pay homage to that Motherhood which was
her supreme glory; or, on the other hand, she may
still be in this world, foreseeing the celebration
of her triumph after her painful life among us.
But this last hypothesis is promptly demolished by
Mary's unheeding attitude, for she appears to be
completely unaware of the presence of the winged
musicians, and intent only on amusing the Child.
In fact, these are all unsupported theories, and
it would be simpler to admit that we just do not
understand. I need only add that these two
pictures are painted in loud colours which are
sometimes positively shrill to make it clear that
this faery spectacle presented in a crazy Gothic
setting leaves one feeling vaguely uncomfortable.

As a refreshing contrast, however, one can always
linger in front of the panel showing St. Anthony
talking with St. Paul; it is the only restful
picture in the whole series, and one is already so
accustomed to the vehemence of the others that one
is almost tempted to find it too unexciting, to
consider it too anodyne.

In a rural setting that is all bright blue and
moss green, the two recluses are sitting face to
face: St. Anthony curiously attired, for a man
who has just crossed the desert, in a pearl-grey
cloak, a blue robe and a pink cap; St. Paul
dressed in his famous robe of palms, which has
here become a mere robe of rushes, with a doe at
his feet and the traditional raven flying through
the trees to bring him the usual hermit's meal of
a loaf of bread.

In this picture the colouring is quiet and
delicate, the composition superb: the subject may
have put a certain restraint upon Grünewald, but
he has lost none of the qualities which make him a
great painter. To anyone who prefers the cordial,
expected welcome of a pleasing picture to the
uncertainties of a visit to some more turbulent
work of art, this wing will undoubtedly seem the
nicest, soundest and sanest of them all. It
constitutes a halt in the man's mad gallop--but
only a brief halt, for he sets off again almost at
once, and in the next wing we find him giving free
rein to his fancy, caracolling along dangerous
paths, and sounding a full fanfare of colours--as
violent and tempestuous as he was in his other
works.

The Temptation of St. Anthony
must have given him
enormous pleasure, for this picture of a demons'
sabbath waging war on the good monk called for the
most convulsive attitudes, the most extravagant
forms and the most vehement colours. Nor was he
slow to grasp this opportunity of exploiting the
droller side of the supernatural. But if there is
extraordinary life and colour in the Temptation,
there is also utter confusion. Indeed, the
picture is in such a tangle that it is impossible
to distinguish between the limbs of the various
devils, and one would be hard put to it to say
which paw or wing beating or scratching the Saint
belonged to which animal or bird.

The frantic hurly-burly in which these creatures
are taking part is none the less captivating for
that. It is true that Grünewald cannot match the
ingenious variety and the very orderly disorder of
a Bruegel or a Hieronymus Bosch, and that there is
nothing here to compare with the diversity of
clearly delineated and discreetly insane larvae
which you find in the Fall of the Angels in the
Brussels Museum: our painter has a more restricted
fancy, a more limited imagination. He gives us a
few demons' heads stuck with stags' antlers or
straight horns, a shark's maw, and what appears to
be the muzzle of a walrus or a calf; the rest of
his superall belong to the bird family, and with
arms in place of feet look like the offspring of
empuses that have been covered by angry cocks.

All these escapees from an infernal aviary are
clustered excitedly around the anchorite, who has
been thrown on his back and is being dragged along
by his hair. Looking rather like a Dutch version
of Father Becker with his flowing beard, St.
Anthony is screaming with fear, trying to protect
his face with one hand, and in the other clutching
his stick and his rosary, which are being pecked
at furiously by a hen wearing a carapace in lieu
of feathers. The monstrous creatures are all
closing in for the kill; a sort of giant parrot,
with a green head, crimson arms, yellow claws and
grey-gold plumage, is on the point of clubbing the
monk, while another demon is pulling off his grey
cloak and chewing it up, and yet others are
joining in, swinging rib-bones and frantically
tearing his clothes to get at him.

Considered simply as a man, St. Anthony is
wonderfully lifelike in gesture and expression;
and once you have taken your fill of the whole
dizzy scramble, you may notice two
thought-provoking details which you overlooked at
first, hidden as they seem to be in the bottom
corners. One, in the right-hand corner, is a
sheet of paper on which a few lines are written;
the other is a weird, hooded creature, sitting
quite naked beside the Saint, and writhing in
agony.

The paper bears this inscription: Ubi eras Jhesu
bone, ubi eras, quare non affuisti ut sanares
vulnera mea?--which can be translated as:
'Where were you, good Jesus, where were you? And
why did you not come and dress my wounds?'

This plaint, doubtless uttered by the hermit in
his distress, is heard and answered, for if you
look right at the top of the picture you will see
a legion of angels coming down to release the
captive and overpower the demons.

It may be asked whether this desperate appeal is
not also being made by the monster lying in the
opposite corner of the picture and raising his
weary head heavenwards. And is this creature a
larva or a man? Whatever it may be, one thing is
certain: no painter has ever gone so far in the
representation of putrefaction, nor does any
medical textbook contain a more frightening
illustration of skin disease. This bloated body,
moulded in greasy white soap mottled with blue,
and mamillated with boils and carbuncles, is the
hosanna of gangrene, the song of triumph of decay!

Was Grünewald's intention to depict a demon in its
most despicable form? I think not. On careful
examination the figure in question is seen to be a
decomposing, suffering human being. And if it is
recalled that this picture, like the others, comes
from the Anthonite Abbey of Isenheim, everything
becomes clear. A brief account of the aims of
this Order will, I think, suffice to explain the
riddle. The Anthonite or Anthonine Order was
founded in the Dauphiné in 1093 by a nobleman
called Gaston whose son was cured of the burning
sickness through the intercession of St. Anthony;
its raison d'être
was the care of people suffering
from this type of disease. Placed under the Rule
of St. Augustine, the Order spread rapidly across
France and Germany, and became so popular in the
latter country that during Grünewald's lifetime,
in 1502, the Emperor Maximilian I granted it, as a
mark of esteem, the right to bear the Imperial
arms on its escutcheon, together with the blue tau
which the monks themselves were to wear on their
black habit.

Now there was at that time an Anthonite abbey at
Isenheim which had already stood there for over a
century. The burning sickness was still rife, so
that the monastery was in fact a hospital. We
know too that it was the Abbot of Isenheim, or
rather, to use the terminology of this Order, the
Preceptor, Guido Guersi, who commissioned this
polyptych from Grünewald

It is now easy to understand the inclusion of St.
Anthony in this series of paintings. It is also
easy to understand the terrifying realism and
meticulous accuracy of Grünewald's Christ-figures,
which he obviously modelled on the corpses in the
hospital mortuary; the proof is that Dr. Richet,
examining his Crucifixions from the medical point
of view, states that 'attention to detail is
carried to the point of indicating the
inflammatory halo which develops around minor
wounds'. Above all, it is easy to understand the
picture--painted from life in the hospital
ward--of that hideous, agonized figure in the
Temptation, which is neither a larva nor a demon,
but simply a poor wretch suffering from the
burning sickness.

It should be added that the written descriptions
of this scourge which have come down to us
correspond in every respect with Grünewald's
pictorial description, so that any doctor who
wants to know what form this happily extinct
disease took can go and study the sores and the
affected tissues shown in the painting at Colmar.

Two doctors have given their attention to this
figure: Charcot and Richet. The former, in Les
Syphilitiques dans l'art, sees it above all as a
picture of the so--called 'Neapolitan disease';
the latter, in L'Art
et la Médecine, hesitates
between a disease of that type and leprosy.

The burning sickness, also known as holy fire,
hell fire and St. Anthony's fire, first appeared
in Europe in the tenth century, and swept the
whole continent. It partook of both gangrenous
ergotism and the plague, showing itself in the
form of apostems and abscesses, gradually
spreading to the arms and legs, and after burning
them up, detaching them little by little from the
torso. That at least is how it was described in
the fifteenth century by the biographers of St.
Lydwine, who was afflicted with the disease. Dom
Félibien likewise mentions it in his History of
Paris, where he says of the epidemic which ravaged
France in the twelfth century: 'The victims' blood
was affected by a poisonous inflammation which
consumed the whole body, producing tumours which
developed into incurable ulcers and caused
thousands of deaths.'

What is certain is that not a single remedy proved
successful in checking the disease, and that often
it was cured only by the intercession of the
Virgin and the saints.

The Virgin's intervention is still commemorated by
the shrine of Notre-Dame des Ardents in Picardy,
and there is a well-known cult of the holy candle
of Arras. As for the saints, apart from St.
Anthony, people invoked St. Martin, who had saved
the lives of a number of victims gathered together
in a church dedicated to him; prayers were also
said to St. Israel, Canon of Le Dorat, to St.
Gilbert, Bishop of Meaux, and finally to
Geneviève. This was because, one day in the reign
of Louis the Fat when her shrine was being carried
in solemn procession around the Cathedral of
Paris, she cured a crowd of people afflicted with
the disease who had taken refuge in the basilica,
and this miracle caused such a stir that, in order
to preserve the memory of it, a church was built
in the same city under the invocation of
Sainte-Geneviève des Ardents; it no longer exists,
but the Parisian Breviary still celebrates the
Saint's feast-day under that name.

But to return to Grünewald, who, I repeat, has
clearly left us a truthful picture of a victim of
this type of gangrene, the Colmar Museum also
contains a predella Entombment, with a livid
Christ speckled with flecks of blood, a hard-faced
St. John with pale ochre-coloured hair, a heavily
veiled Virgin and a Magdalen disfigured by tears.
However, this predella is merely a feeble echo of
Grünewald's great Crucifixions: it would be
astounding, seen on its own in a collection of
canvases by other painters, but here it is not
even astonishing.

Mention must be made as well of two rectangular
wings: one depicting a little bandy-legged St.
Sebastian larded with arrows; the other--a panel
cited by Sandrart--St. Anthony holding the Tau,
the crozier of his Order--a St. Anthony so
solemn and so thoughtful that he can even ignore
the demon busily breaking window-panes behind him.
And that brings us to the end of our review of
this master-painter's works. You take leave of
him spellbound for ever. And if you look for his
origins you will look in vain, for none of the
painters who preceded him or who were his
contemporaries resembles him.

One can perhaps discern a certain foreign
influence in Grünewald's work; as Goutzwiller
points out in his booklet on the Colmar Museum, it
is possible to see a reminiscence or a vague
imitation of the contemporary Italian landscape
manner in the way in which he plans his settings
and sprinkles his skies with blue. Had he
travelled in Italy, or had he seen pictures by
Italian masters in Germany--perhaps at Isenheim
itself, since the Preceptor Guido Guersi, to judge
by his name, hailed from beyond the Alps? No one
knows; but in any event, the very existence of
this influence is open to question. It is, in
fact, by no means certain that this man who
anticipates modern painting, reminding one
sometimes of Renoir with his acid colours and of
the Japanese with his skilful nuances, did not
arrange his landscapes without benefit of memories
or copies, painting them from nature as he found
them in the countryside of Thuringia or Swabia;
for he could easily have seen the bright bluish
backcloth of his Nativity in those parts. Nor do
I share Goutzwiller's opinion that there is an
unmistakable 'Italian touch' in the inclusion of a
cluster of palm-trees in the picture of the two
anchorites. The introduction of this type of tree
into an Oriental landscape is so natural and so
clearly called for by the subject that it does not
imply any outside suggestion or influence. In any
event, if Grünewald did know the work of foreign
artists, it is surprising that he should have
confined himself to borrowing their method of
arranging and depicting skies and woods, while
refraining from copying their technique of
composition and their way of painting Jesus and
the Virgin, the angels and the saints.

His landscapes, I repeat, are definitely German,
as is proved by certain details. These may strike
many people as having been invented to create an
effect, to add a note of pathos to the drama of
Calvary, yet in fact they are strictly accurate.
This is certainly true of the bloody soil in which
the Karlsruhe cross is planted, and which is no
product of the imagination. Grünewald did much of
his painting in Thuringia, where the earth,
saturated with iron oxide, is red; I myself have
seen it sodden with rain and looking like the mud
of a slaughter-house, a swamp of blood.

As for his human figures, they are all typically
German, and he owes just as little to Italian art
when it comes to the arrangement of dress fabrics.
These he has really woven himself, and they are so
distinctive that they would be sufficient in
themselves to identify his pictures among those of
all other painters. With him we are far removed
from the little puffs, the sharp elbows and the
short frills of the Primitives; he drapes his
clothes magnificently in flowing movements and
long folds, using materials that are closely woven
and deeply dyed. In the Karlsruhe Crucifixion
they have something about them suggestive of bark
ripped from a tree: the same harsh quality as the
picture itself. At Colmar this impression is not
so pronounced, but they still reveal the
multiplicity of layers, the slight stiffness of
texture, the ridges and the hollows which are the
hallmark of Grünewald's work; this is particularly
true of Christ's loincloth and St. John the
Baptist's cloak.

Here again he is nobody's pupil, and we have no
alternative but to put him down in the history of
painting as an exceptional artist, a barbarian of
genius who bawls out coloured prayers in an
original dialect, an outlandish tongue.

His tempestuous soul goes from one extreme to
another, restless and storm-tossed even during
moments of deliberate repose; but just as it is
deeply moving when meditating on the episodes of
the Passion, so it is erratic and well-nigh
baroque when reflecting on the joys of the
Nativity. The truth is that it simpers and
stammers when there is no torturing to be done,
for Gruenwald is the painter of tombs rather than
cribs, and he can only depict the Virgin
successfully when he makes her suffer. Otherwise
he sees her as red-faced and vulgar, and there is
such a difference between his Madonnas of the
sorrowful mysteries and his Madonnas of the joyful
mysteries that one wonders whether he was not
following an aesthetic system, a scheme of
intentional antitheses.

It is, indeed, quite likely that he decided that
the quality of divine Motherhood would only come
out clearly under the stress of the suffering
endured at the foot of the cross. This theory
would certainly fit in with the one he adopted
whenever he wished to glorify the divine nature of
the Son, for he always painted the living Christ
as the Psalmist and Isaiah pictured him--as the
poorest and ugliest of men--and only restored
his divine appearance to him after his Passion and
death. In other words, Grünewald made the
ugliness of the crucified Messiah the symbol of
all the sins of the world which Christ took upon
himself, thus illustrating a doctrine which was
expounded by Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Cyril,
St. Justin and countless others, and which was
current for a good part of the Middle Ages.

He may also have been the victim of a technique
which Rembrandt was to use after him: the
technique of suggesting the idea of divinity by
means of the light emanating from the very face
that is supposed to represent it. Admirable in
his Resurrection of Christ, this secretion of
light is less convincing when he applies it to the
little Virgin in the Angelic Concert and
completely ineffective when he uses it to portray
the fundamentally vulgar Child in the Nativity.

He probably placed too much reliance on these
devices, crediting them with an efficacy they
could not possess. It should, indeed, be noted
that, if the light spinning like an artificial sun
around the risen Christ suggests to us a vision of
a divine world, it is because Christ's face lends
itself to that idea by its gentle beauty. It
strengthens rather than weakens the significance
and effect of that huge halo, which in turn
softens and enhances the features, veiling them in
a mist of gold.

Such is the complete Grünewald polyptych in the
Colmar Museum. I do not intend to deal here with
those paintings attributed to him which are
scattered among other art-galleries and churches,
and which for the most part are not his work. I
shall also pass over the Munich St. Erasmus and
St. Maurice, which, if it must be accepted as his
work, is cold and uncharacteristic; I shall even
set aside the Fall of Jesus, which like the famous
Crucifixion has been transferred from Cassel to
Karlsruhe, and which is undoubtedly genuine. It
shows a blue-clad Christ on his knees, dragging
his cross, in the midst of a group of soldiers
dressed in red and executioners dressed in white
with pistachio stripes. He is gritting his teeth
and digging his fingernails into the wood, but his
expression is less of suffering than of anger, and
he looks like a damned soul. This, in short, is a
bad Grünewald.

Confining myself therefore to the brilliant,
awe-inspiring flower of his art, the Karlsruhe
Crucifixion and the nine pieces at Colmar, I find
that his work can only be defined by coupling
together contradictory terms.

The man is, in fact, a mass of paradoxes and
contrasts. This Orlando furioso of painting is
forever leaping from one extravagance to another,
but when necessary the frenzied demoniac turns
into a highly skilled artist who is up to every
trick of the trade. Though he loves nothing
better than a startling clash of colours, he can
also display, when in good form, an extremely
delicate sense of light and shade--his
Resurrection is proof of that--and he knows how
to combine the most hostile hues by gently coaxing
them together with adroit chromatic diplomacy.

He is at once naturalistic and mystical, savage
and sophisticated, ingenuous and deceitful. One
might say that he personifies the fierce and
pettifogging spirit of the Germany of his time, a
Germany excited by the ideas of the Reformation.
Was he involved, like Cranach and Dürer, in that
emotional religious movement which was to end in
the most austere coldness of the heart, once the
Protestant swamp had frozen over? I cannot say--
though he certainly lacks nothing of the harsh
fervour and vulgar faith which characterized the
illusory springtide of the early sixteenth
century. For me, however, he personifies still
more the religious piety of the sick and the poor.
That awful Christ who hung dying over the altar of
the Isenheim hospital would seem to have been made
in the image of the ergotics who prayed to him;
they must surely have found consolation in the
thought that this God they invoked had suffered
the same torments as themselves, and had become
flesh in a form as repulsive as their own; and
they must have felt less forsaken, less
contemptible. It is easy to see why Grünewald's
name, unlike the names of Holbein, Cranach and
Dürer, is not to be found in the account-books or
the records of commissions left by emperors and
princes. His pestiferous Christ would have
offended the taste of the courts; he could only be
understood by the sick, the unhappy and the monks,
by the suffering members of Christ.